A Street at St Ives. [Face page 168.
After sending a wire that I should come without fail, I made arrangements with a boatman to take me across the bay. It was close on three o’clock the following afternoon when we rounded the pier head and set the bow of our little craft for Gwithian beach. A fair wind filled the brown sail and drove us at a merry pace over the waves of this loveliest of bays, where the Cornish sea displays its vividest hues in a setting of silver sand. Landing was practicable, and the boat was beached near where my friend was awaiting me on the shore.
“You’re rather late,” said he, as we shook hands.
“Well now, you had better go and have a good look at the cliffs whilst it’s light. You’ll see where I’ve been whitewashing the rocks. Get the twists and turns of the way down fixed in your mind: that will be helpful later on. In the meanwhile I’m going to overhaul the whole of the gear.”
I took the direction he indicated and, stepping out briskly across the intervening neck of rising ground between the two bays, soon reached the dizzy edge of the cliffs. A little on my left hand, zigzagging down the steep descent and almost to the edge of the foam, lay a white dotted line that was to guide us in the darkness. The mouths of the caves—there are four—frequented by the seals were some two or three hundred feet below me, but I could not see them.
Bleak and lone are these Gwithian cliffs, merciless the winds that sweep them. Not a tree or a bush is to be seen, and even the heather is stunted. No note of songbird meets the ear, nor scream of seafowl, only the sullen boom of the Atlantic groundswell in the caves so far below. Along the coast towards Newquay sunlit headlands stretched out into the ocean; and the low promontory of Trevose, dim and unsubstantial-looking, lay on the far horizon. The mellow rays of the sun now and again caught the snow-white plumage of some bird along the coast, and lit up the surf at the foot of the distant cliffs.
Not a gull floated over the bay below me; but a string of cormorants, with black flight, skimmed the heaving surface just beyond the dark shadow of the coastline, and disappeared round a jagged point.
I was following the last of these birds with my eyes, when my gaze was arrested by the appearance of a seal below me, and as far as I could judge, not twenty yards from the mouth of one of the caves. It carried its head, which looked as black as jet, clear of the surface, and betrayed not the least sign of alarm. After about a minute it sank—it did not dive—out of sight. I remained watching, in the hope that the quaint-looking creature would show itself again; but, as it gave no sign and the sun was nearing the horizon, I left the cliff and made my way across the heather and stubble to Reskageage.